What Is Link Building? A Beginner Guide

If you want more traffic to your business, linking building is an essential skill.

In fact, there’s no factor within SEO rankings that is more important than link building. If you want to rank high, you need as many links as possible bringing people back to your website.

With this guide, you will learn everything you need to know in order to begin building high-quality links and boost your ranking.

Contents

1. The Basics of Link Building
2. What are High-Quality Links?
3. How to Get Backlinks using Content Marketing
4. The Penalties of Black Hat SEO
5. Link Building Strategies
6. Tips for Advanced Link Building
   
   

1. The Basics of Link Building

Links are one of the foundation pieces of Google’s search engine algorithm. In fact, Google came out and said that links and content are the top influencers of rank.

But why?

To answer this, let’s take a step back to understand what link building even is.

Link building is the process of receiving promotions from external sources, either other websites or social media, in the form of backlinks (also known as inbound links or hyperlinks).

The goal is to increase traffic from other websites to your own as a form of advertising.

But that’s not to say that you just need an absurd amount of links directed towards your website. Google focuses on the quality of the link, not the quantity. Quality links provide the best indicators that your website will provide the information people are searching for.

This seems a little vague though. What makes a link high quality?

We’ll answer this in the next chapter.

2. What are High-Quality Links?

Link building can result in one of two things happening:

1. You build a high-quality link and watch as your ranking goes up and up and up, or
2. You build a low-quality link and watch as your rank plummets.

This doesn’t leave much room for mistakes. It’s important to know what makes a link “high quality” in the eyes of Google…especially when the website is linking to you.

So what makes a backlink high-quality?

On a page with PageRank

Is the page that’s linking to you highly ranked on PageRank? If so, then it’ll have a huge impact on your own rank, especially if you’re a smaller page.

PageRank is an algorithm developed by Google that evaluates the quality and quantity of the links to a specific webpage. It measures the importance of the website’s pages, therefore influencing your rank. This information isn’t shown publicly, but it has a great impact on the search engine algorithm that Google uses today.

There are workarounds to finding information regarding your own PageRank or the pages that backlinking to you. Ahrefs can be a good indicator of the URLRating of the backlink.

From a relevant and trusted source

This is you. You need to have content that is of high quality and provides accurate information.

But it is also important that the website that is linking to you is relevant to your business or industry. According to an interview from an ex-Google engineer: “Today it’s more about relevance to the site’s theme in regards to your, relevance is the new PageRank.”

Not only do you need to have accurate information but the people linking to you also need to be related to your industry.

Non-misleading anchor text is used, the exact phrase is best

One thing that makes a link more clickable is knowing what exactly it is you’re clicking on.

When anchor links indicate exactly what the viewer is clicking on, the customer’s expectations are met. If you see an anchor link that says cute puppy video, you’re expecting that when you click on it.

The issue with anchor links is that they can to be anything. If the text says one thing and the link turns out to be something else, you’ll feel misled. That results in an unhappy customer.

Google sees anchor links using keywords and notes that the link was useful regarding that specific keyword. While it does help your SEO ranking, it’s important that the anchor links aren’t spammed because that will end up hurting your rank.

Editorial links

While there are a few different ways for a website to link to your page, editorial links are one of the most effective ways of generating leads and traffic.

Google puts a lot of weight on editorial links. This is because the algorithm sees that someone else find your article useful enough to spread the information you’ve posted.

3. How to Get Backlinks using Content Marketing

Simply publishing content isn’t going to get you very far when it comes to obtaining backlinks.

Not all content and copy are viewed the same. Certain types of content are more likely to become backlinked than others.

In order to determine what kind of content will get a backlink, ask yourself: “What have I linked to in my own articles?” You’ll find it’s likely one of the following:

i. Visuals

This includes images, diagrams, infographics, and other charts or graphs.

These are linked to most because they are extremely useful for people and they are convenient to link to. Anyone that shares or uses your graph within their article to help confirm their message will provide a link to your website.

Visuals are a powerful tool that helps visualize information in a creative way while also making it easier and more interactive for viewers.

ii. List Articles

List posts are typically articles that condense information into little chunks. This can be tips, reasons why, myths, how-tos, and the list goes on. They can be just about anything

They are clear and concise pockets of information that are easy for viewers to read and easy to take information from to help prove the point of the article that’s linking to it.

List posts generate more backlinks that most other formats including videos and infographics, according to BuzzSumo’s analysis of 1 million articles.

iii. Research and Data

When a business reveals game-changing research and data, the industry goes wild.

Why? Because people need to know about the latest and greatest industry-related statistics, research, studies, and surveys in order to stay on top.

When new research is released, people will source the original material when spreading the word. The backlinks add up fast.

iv. Guides

Guides provide the ultimate insight.

A great guide will provide comprehensive information about everything you need to know on a given topic. Everyone, from beginners to industry specialists, can benefit from it.

The ultimate guides pack a lot of extremely useful information all in one place, making them the go-to.

4. The Penalties of Black Hat SEO

If the links aren’t following Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, they’re likely following black hat SEO practices, which can result in serious consequences to your ranking.

Google Penguin is an algorithm designed to detect and dish out penalties of spammy link building techniques. The only way to avoid its wrath is to build quality links and avoid any linking that seems fishy.

Additionally, Google can give you manual penalties based on unnatural links.

Unnatural links are intended to manipulate search engine results through the PageRank algorithm.

Unnatural links are considered to be the following:

• Inorganic
• Toxic
• Low quality
• Artificial
• Deceptive and manipulative

5. Link Building Strategies

There are countless strategies for link building. We’ll go over some options in depth.

i. Resource Page

For those unfamiliar, resource pages are purely dedicated to linking out to other sources and providing valuable resources on a topic. You need to find content that other people can’t find very easily, and then make accessible through your site.

ii. Guest Blogging

This is one of the oldest link building strategies in the book.

How it works is simple: write an article for another website in your industry. Once that is complete, have the article link out to yourself since you’re the author.

iii. Other Techniques

Here’s a resource page dedicated to other link building strategies if the two examples above don’t suit your current needs as a business.

6. Tips for Advance Link Building

Once you have the basics down and websites are backlinking to your articles, it’s time for some tips that will help gain even more links.

In a perfect world, everyone would credit everyone. However, this isn’t always the case. When someone mentions your website or business, they should be linking to your website, but they don’t always.

With a kind message asking for them to provide the link, most people are happy to accommodate you for this request.

The real struggle is finding them. BuzzSumo is a great option for uncovering. They will find the unlinked mentions of your website.

Another way of discovering some unsourced content is through reverse image sourcing. Similarly to name mentions, a quick nudge towards a link will straighten that right out.

Link building is a very complicated process and it takes a lot of trial and error to get right. This guide is meant to set you up for success and help you grow your backlinks to gain traffic to your business.

Beginner’s Guide to SEO Split Testing

When it comes to making landing pages, email copy or even ads, it can be hard to gauge what will perform the best.

Relying on guesses or chance for your marketing decisions is risky. You’re much better off split testing.

Most people have heard of the term A/B testing before. SEO split testing is relatively new to the marketing world but is quickly becoming an essential tool for conversion-driven companies.

What is Split Testing?

Our goal with SEO split testing is to compare multiple versions of the same ad or landing page and see which performs better.

Imagine you’re at the optometrist, getting an eye exam. Split testing is similar: you try out different variations until you’ve found the option that suits you best. When it comes to SEO, the best option is the one that most effectively achieves your goals for the campaign.

In order to begin split testing, you’ll need some ads. The best practice is to create two or more ads that have minor changes to the design, copy or layout (more on that later.) You’ll then show each ad to similar target audiences and monitor their performance.

The Benefit of Split Testing

Simply put, split testing is valuable to businesses because it’s low cost with a high reward.

You could pay someone to write five articles per week, but they may only generate 10 leads. Imagine the savings you could earn by only writing one article in the time it takes to write two but split testing the calls to action (CTAs).

You may find that the number of leads goes from 10 to 20. The extra time spent writing the article means it’s of high quality and unrushed. Even if the test doesn’t yield the results, you can use the knowledge you gained to make data-driven changes for the next time.

The eventual success of your tests will ultimately set you off better than a business that didn’t test.

It’s easy to determine which title has a bigger impact or which button is most clickable using testing. Minor changes and adjustments can make your conversions take off and keep people on your page for as long as possible.

How to Run Split Testing

Before You Run the Test

Step 1: What do you test?

Before you do anything, you have to identify the aspects of the ad or landing page you want to test. It may prove to be a longer list than you bargained for.

However, it’s a good idea to only one variable at a time. That way, you’ll know whether (and exactly how) the change made an impact. These changes don’t have to be major. Even changing the colour of your CTA can improve your results!

If you want to test multiple variables, that’s perfectly fine! The best practice is to test them individually and identify the top performers.

Now, there are times when it does make sense to test multiple variables instead of just one. This is called multivariate testing. This method takes longer to set up and requires more traffic to complete. The more you change, the more combinations you have to test to get useful results.

Step 2: What are your goals?

It’s important to identify the specific goal you want to focus on throughout the test.

Though you’ll end up monitoring multiple metrics for each test, you should choose a primary focus before you start testing.

Why? Simply because it allows you to identify which variable will influence what metric.

You should identify where do you want the variable to end up when the test is done.

Step 3: Creation

It’s time to create your various tests!

You have your variables and goals, so all that’s left is to make them. The first step is to make a control – an unaltered version of whatever it is you want to test. If this is a landing page, you would design and create copy how you normally would.

Once that is finished, it’s time to build your variant page or ad. This will be whatever you’ll be testing against your original. For example, if you’re wondering whether videos or images provide higher engagement, you would set up your unaltered version with just images. Your variation would then replace the images with videos.

Step 4: How Significant Do the Results have to be?

It’s easy to say that the results just have to be better than the original.

But by how much? If you got one more conversion than the original, is that worth it? Probably not.

Statistical significance is the most important part of the testing process. You may recall the term confidence level from your old statistics class. Typically you want to have a 95% confidence level, but the higher the percentage, the surer you are that you’ll have the results you think.

During the Test

Please note that you shouldn’t run more than one test for a single campaign. If you do, it can complicate your results. If you have an ad campaign that directs to a landing page that you’re testing, how do you know which one is actually generating leads?

Step 5: Test the Control and Variant at the Same Time

To begin your test on a website or email, you’ll need to use a testing tool.

Using Google Analytics’ Experiments, you can test up to 10 versions of a web page to monitor the performance.

Once you have that in place, you’ll need to run the campaign at the same time. If you were to run test A about furnaces in the winter and then test B in the summer, you won’t know if it was actually affected by your changes or if it was just the time you ran them.

Step 6: How Long Should the Test Last?

Oftentimes one of the downfalls of testing is limiting the amount of time to see the results.

You won’t see results overnight. It typically takes a week or two to see the variations in the different tests.

So don’t panic if you don’t see results yet!

After the Test

Step 7: Was the Test Significant?

It’s time to reflect on the test you just ran.

Looking back on your original goal, did you meet it? Which performed better?

Once you determine that, it’s time to find out if the test results were statistically significant. Can you justify the change?

Hubspot offers a free split testing calculator for you to use if you don’t want to do it manually.

Step 8: Improve!

These tests are all about making improvements to gain traffic and conversions.

So use the information you’ve gathered to improve your results.

If the test you just ran didn’t work out how you thought, then run another one with a different change! If you were successful, use that in your next campaign.

Use your tests to discover new ways to develop your own content and improve!

Beginner’s Guide to Creating Quality Content Using SEO Practices in 2019

What did you last type into Google? Chances are whatever the question, it recommended a blog or article on the topic.

In 2019, search engines like Google care about solving the intent of the searcher. This means that the viewer’s attention must be grabbed, the information was helpful, and the article had steps in place to engage with the company.

Do you want to learn about how to write a quality blog post that helps your relevancy on search engines?

Here’s a beginner’s guide to everything SEO to optimize your next blog post.

Creating Effective Content

Your goal as a writer is to keep people on the website.

Content that is overly complicated or boring will cause readers to abandon your page. The experience that your audience has is an important one.

You aren’t the only one writing a blog today. Countless blogs are posted every day, so how do you grab people’s attention?

Well, it all starts with creating meaning content that educates or inspires your readers. How do you do that?

The first thing to do when creating compelling content, is to find a compelling topic to write about.

Choosing A Topic

The best thing to write about are things that both relate to your services and educational topics. Simply put, people find blogs by searching for questions they have. So, answer them!

The easiest way to identify this is to think like your audience and ask the following:

• What do they want to know about?
• What will they identify with?
  

This isn’t to say you should never write about your own business when it makes sense. Your company just won an award or was featured in a major new article? Perfect opportunities to write about what your company can do for the masses!

But for most blog posts, it’s best to focus on the industry’s questions. This is largely due to the fact that the people you are hoping to reach don’t know about you yet! If you only talk about your business or yourself, people won’t be able to find you by searching.

Are you stuck for ideas or have writers block? Consider talking to other people in the company in different departments or that have unique perspectives. They could be a gateway to ideas!

Here are some questions to ask regarding potential leads to topics:

• What are frequent questions from customers?
• What does our audience need help with?
• What do people wish they knew regarding our industry?
• What are others in our industry talking about?

It may be beneficial to start with a very broad topic. As you research and write, you’ll likely find subtopics that could be expanded on. Try to approach the broad topic in different ways to create different avenues for expansion.

Keyword Research

Keywords are the words or phrases that are commonly typed into the search engine. They are the main words people are looking for information on.

What are the words that your industry uses all the time? If you run a company that repairs air conditioners, your keywords could be “air conditioner repair.”

The concept of keywords is not to completely overwhelm your content with a keyword every sentence. It actually negatively impacts your search engine optimization because it’s considered stuffing.

Think about incorporating them naturally in the headlines and body, as if they were a conversation.

Language allows us to say the same thing differently. Maybe your keyword can be said a different way. Instead of repeating “air conditioner repair”, use a synonym. This can also help search engines to pick up on different nomenclatures because not everyone searches for the same thing the same way.

Develop a Long-tail Keyword and Title

Long-tail keywords are very specifically targeted keywords.

They typically are 3 or more words and contain a head term combined with more generic search terms. The head term should relate to what you want your company to be known for and what topics you want to provide knowledge on.

A good practice is to develop and focus on a single long-tail keyword.

Why are Long-tail Keywords Useful for Titles?

Often times the title is the opener for a question to be answered. Those who search for long-tail keywords will be the most likely candidate to read your post in its entirety and pursue your company further. They are the ones who will click down the conversion funnel.

Make a Working Title from a Long-tail Keyword

Everyone reads the title before committing to the rest of the blog. That means you have to make sure people are interested enough to continue by catching the viewer’s attention.

A working title is something you base the direction of your post off of. For example, using the broad topic of “video advertisements”, the working title could be “How to Optimize Your Video Advertisements in 2019”. We took the very general idea that could have been pretty much anything and made it specific.

Once you finish the post, go back to your title and rework it to align better with the end result. Your title should help people as well as search engines to decipher what the post will contain specifically. Readers will identify what they can get out of spending their time viewing your post.

Shorten Your URL Slug

A post slug is typically a viewer friendly URL name of a post or page.

They ensure clarity of the topic. For example, website.com/blog/our-first-blog.

Your slug doesn’t have to be the title of your blog. When slugs are overly long or complicated can be confusing and not memorable for users to find later.

It is also useful to have a consistent slug if the title changes. For example, if you intend on trying to better optimize your title to gain traffic, you don’t have to then also change the slug.

Best practice is to exclude years or numbers in general, this way you don’t have to change it if you update the page.

It’s important to keep the URL slug as short as possible without losing key information.

Optimize Image Alt-texts

It’s crucial to incorporate images throughout your blog to provide a visual interest.

Search engines can’t see images like we do, so you can’t optimize for actual images. What you can optimize is the alt text or name.

An alt name is information regarding what the image is about. From a search engine perspective, the best descriptions will better the results.

It’s an easy thing to forget but can ultimately help if you include them. Consider creating an alt text for your images based on your long-tail keyword or working title.

Additionally, including these will help with accessibility for impaired users and allow you to increase your reach.

Create an Interesting Meta Description

What’s the next thing users see after they read the title? The meta description.

The meta description is the brief synopsis of your article found right below the title. It is used by both viewers and search engines to provide information regarding what you intend to talk about.

Meta descriptions don’t directly affect your SEO; however, they are useful for including keywords. Searched information is often bolded if your article uses the keywords or the meta description does.

They should not mislead people into clicking on something they weren’t looking for. It’s good practice to use words that indicate what you want viewers to gain from reading further. This could be words like:

• Get
• Use
• See
• Learn

If you’re ever stuck on what to write to think of it as a headline. How would you get the attention of the viewer?

Including Strategic Blog Links

With more traffic, you’ll be able to develop better relationships with your viewers. You want users to feel that they can trust you.

So how can you create that trust with an informational blog? By being credible.

Including links to your sources throughout the blog will showcase that you have researched the topic and know what you’re talking about.

Now, including a link for every paragraph is not what you want to do. It’s best to sprinkle your sources only where it makes sense.

Likely at this point, you’ve got a few topics in mind for what you could write about, so plan accordingly! You can incorporate hyperlinks, Call to Actions (CTAs), to other blog posts of yours on related topics.

Have you already explained a topic that you mention? Link to it! This is good practice because if someone finds your content useful, they could find your services right within the blog.

Don’t Just Use Text

Plain text that all looks the same is frankly just boring.

By offering other types of media like images or videos will greatly increase the amount of time people spend on your article.

Including videos, especially near the top of your article, increases your chance of being on the front page of Google by 53 times. Why? Because people that take the time to watch your video, increase your bounce rate.

In the eyes of search engines, if people just view your page and then leave, it didn’t really help them. When people click to watch a video embedded on your blog, Google sees that as people finding valuable resources on your site. And it is more likely to recommend the article to people.

Most people would rather watch a video than read text, and giving people the option, puts value in your content.

If you’re just starting out on your blog or if you’re just looking to better your blog writing, this is an excellent map to creating quality content.

Make the most of every post on your site by incorporating these tips!

The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Google Ads

Google is quite possibly the most powerful online advertising platform out there.

You can run ads to generate more leads and revenue. You can sell more products online. And you can bring more traffic to your website.

Best of all, Google Ads are relatively simple to execute.

Why Google Ads?

Google is the most popular search engine in the world, receiving 3.5 billion search queries a day and an estimated 700% return on investment.  It’s used by people everywhere to ask questions from “How many ounces of flour equates to one cup?” to “What is the best outfit for a first date?” These questions are answered with a combination of paid advertisements and organic results.

Ok, so advertising on Google makes the most sense from an ROI standpoint – based on the massive amount of daily users – but what are the tangible benefits to advertising on Google?

Google Ads are:

• Scalable
  • If you create a Google Ads campaign that is converting at a profitable rate, there is no reason to cap spend on that campaign. Just hop back into your Google Ads account and bump up your PPC budget. Your leads and profits rise accordingly!
• Measurable
  • With detailed conversion tracking, Google Ads PPC is one of the most measurable of online channels.
  • Google Ads is more transparent, providing tons of PPC metrics.
  • Quickly determine if your campaigns are sucking or returning ROI.
• Flexible
  • Google Ads provides tons of options so you can customize your campaigns.
  • Hyper-target the audiences you most want to reach.

In addition, specific keyword match types for example, only show your ad to people who search for an exact keyword you specify, like “Vegas hotels” – filtering out traffic on general terms related to Las Vegas or hotels.

Google Ads Best Practices

Google Ads typically perform quite well without in-depth optimization. However, in order to get the biggest bang for your buck, it’s important to do your research.

What are your competitors doing successfully? How could you implement optimizations into your campaigns to maximize performance?

1. Use ad extensions to display product images, a phone number, a mega-pack of links to your site, and your physical location.
2. Narrow your audience by location, time of day to be targeted, language, browser or device type.
3. Access an enormous network of non-search users on properties like Gmail and YouTube.
   
   

1. Using Google Ad Extensions

Ad extensions are additional bits of information about your business that can be added to your Google text ads. These extensions can automatically pull info from your Google My Business profile or be populated manually. Both types of Google Ad extensions can have value: automatic extensions are convenient, while manual extensions offer powerful customization.

Currently, you can enrich your text ads with 10 types of extensions:

• Sitelink Extensions: additional links you can add to your search ad to allow searchers to view all your various offerings up front
• Location Extensions: show the address of your business as well as hours of operation directly in your search ad; this is a fundamental action to ensure more traffic to your storefront location; must connect a ‘Google My Business’ account to Google Ads to enable location extensions
• Affiliate Location Extensions: these help potential customers find the best, and nearest, retail stores that sell your product; most useful for large brands that are sold nationwide
• Structured Snippet Extensions: these provide advertisers with three additional header lines of text to include meaningful business information
• Call Extensions: allows the business telephone number to be shown on the ad; on mobile devices, users can use this extension to directly dial your business
• Message Extensions: shown on mobile devices, and allows the searcher to contact you via text message; message extensions cannot be tracked for conversions
• App Extensions: this extension allows you to add a mobile app download button next to your ad; a customizable call to action can be included beneath your ad
• Callout Extensions: like Sitelink Extensions, but without clickable links; allows the advertiser to provide additional information and relevance regarding your ad; can help improve the click-through rate and the conversion rate
• Price Extensions: allows the advertiser to display products and/or services alongside their prices directly in the ad; price extensions only appear if Google ranks your ad as #1
• Promotion Extensions: allows the advertiser to include coupons, sales and other deals in their ad; you can schedule promotion extensions within Google Ads for custom holidays and promotions that are exclusive to your business
  

However, extensions don’t always appear when your ad is shown. It depends on:

• Your ad’s position and Adrank; and
• Whether Google predicts the extension will help or hinder your ad’s performance.
  
  

2. Narrowing Your Google Ads Audience

Google lets you narrow your ad’s audience to better reach those who are most likely to be within your target demographic. You can define your audience based on specific demographics, locations and devices – including the ability to exclude users who are outside your niche.

• Demographic targeting includes identifiable audience traits like age, gender, parental status and income.
• Location targeting lets you define your audience by country, regions within a country (like cities or territories) or even within a certain distance of a specific zip or postal code.
• Device targeting is available to display and video campaigns. You can show ads on specific devices, models, carriers or wireless networks.
  
  

3. Leveraging Google’s Non-Search Network

The Google Ads platform gives you the option to display your ads across numerous non-search networks affiliated with Google. This feature is what earns Google Ads its status as the most versatile international advertising platform.

Google’s extended network includes channels such as:

• YouTube TrueView For Action: videos ads that include a direct call-to-action. You only pay when the user elects to view your video. Targeting specific keywords and utilizing call-to-action buttons can greatly reduce your cost-per-click.
• Smart Shopping: this new campaign type uses automation to optimize bidding for maximum ROI. It’s extremely efficient for advertisers with small budgets.
• Display Remarketing: these are image ads shown on Google’s partner sites to users who have visited your site in the past. Remarketing is a great campaign to move the user to conversion.
• Gmail Ads: text ads that appear in users’ promotions inbox in Gmail. If the user clicks, they are brought to a display ad, which will direct the user straight to your landing page.
  
  

Types of Google Ad Campaigns

Google gives you plenty of ad campaigns to choose from. The campaign you select will determine where people will be able to see your ads – so your choice should be based on your specific advertising goals.

Some of the most commonly used campaign types are:

• Search Network Campaign: ads appear in Google Search results (and on other Google sites) when users search for relevant keywords. Your ads are displayed to people who are looking for information related to the content of your ad. The goal of a search network campaign is to generate a specific user action: sales, leads, phone calls or clicks to your website.
• Display Network Campaign: display ads appear to users while they’re browsing online, watching YouTube videos, checking Gmail or using their mobile device and apps. These campaigns can help promote your brand, generate product awareness, or increase sales and leads.
• Shopping Campaign: these ads use Merchant Center product data to show users an image of your product, along with the price and the name of your store. They help to promote what you’re selling, drive traffic to your store (online or offline) and find you more qualified leads.
• Video Campaign: display video ads by themselves or along with other streaming content on YouTube and across the Google Display Network.
• App Campaign: app ads appear across Google’s mobile platforms such as mobile Search, Google Play, the YouTube App and the Display Network. These ads can be used to encourage users to install your app or make in-app actions.
  
  

Google Ads Terminology

Marketing terminology can be daunting. We’ve provided a comprehensive breakdown of some of the most popular Google Ads terms to help you navigate.

AdRank

Your AdRank determines your ad placement. The higher the value, the better you’ll rank, thus a higher chance of getting clicks. Ad Rank is determined by your maximum bid multiplied by your Quality Score.

Bidding

The higher your bid, the better your placement. Your three bidding options are CPC, CPM, or CPE.

Cost-per-click (CPC)

The amount you pay for each click on your ad.

Cost-per-mile (CPM)

The amount you pay for one thousand ad impressions when your ad is shown to a thousand people.

Cost-per-engagement (CPE)

The amount you pay when someone takes a specific action with your ad. You chose this engagement action when you create your campaign.

Campaign Type

The format of your ads and where your ads will appear.

• Search ads: text ads that are displayed among search results on a Google results page.
• Display ads: typically image-based and are shown on web pages within the Google Display Network.
• Video ads: between six and 15 seconds and appear on YouTube.

Click-Through Rate (CTR)

The number of people who click through to your website from your ads.

Conversion Rate (CVR)

A measure of form submissions versus the number of total visits to your landing page. The higher your CVR, the greater the proportion of visitors that turn into leads.

Pay-per-click (PPC)

A type of advertising where the advertiser pays per click on an ad. PPC is not specific to Google Ads but is a very important metric to track when running your campaign.

Quality Score (QS)

A  number determined by Google that rates the quality and relevance of your ads and keywords. Higher quality ads and keywords perform better with your audience. New keywords automatically start out with a Quality Score of 6. Per WordStream:

• A good Quality Score for branded keywords is between 8 and 10.
• A good Quality Score for high-intent commercial keywords is 7 to 9.
• 7 is a good Quality Score for low-intent keywords.
  
  

Get Started With Google Ads

Advertising on Google is an effective way to support a Lead Generation strategy. If you’re looking for guidance or agency experience in the Google Ads realm, contact us today!